originally published 2010

 

Public swim session at the community pool

Azure liquid thinned by pee and drool

Beckons a dinky passerby

Choked by grot collar

And ‘can I help you’ tie

*

Lopped supple flesh from curtain rail of bone

A gleam convulsion such must have been Rome

Yakking slaphappy with

Sebaceous lip resting

On artfully forged teeth

*

Languid the middle class "kapdia" beats

Thick redolence of sun screen and arm-pits

Poaches the moment into

Dauby mush to plaster

Over orthodox mildew

*

To crawl into barbed pith of stacked up hay

Down a flask and slumber through the day

Fortune upon a virid

Phosphorescent clod inhale

Fumes blooming over it

*

Bantling bewails chaste cruelty of art

Never a loving mother at best a torpor tart

Schematics of chance

Failed one’s better off

Planning in advance

*

Reposed in deckchairs suburbanites tranquil

Having discovered cure for Achilles’ heel

Sip common phantom

Of blissful surety excreting

‘We’re in this together’ foam